Gufier?

John McChesney-Young panis at PACBELL.NET
Tue Jul 3 22:50:51 UTC 2007


At 4:58 PM -0400 7/3/07, Philip E. Cleary wrote:

>Someone on another list is trying to find out who or what a "gufier" is.
>The word appears in an act of the assembly of Maryland in 1696 in the
>phrase 'Merchants, Masters, Mates Gufiers Carpenters and Boatswains.'

It's an OCR misprint for an abbreviated form of "Gunners." See the
transcription of the 1696 Maryland act at:

http://tinyurl.com/2q3upk (7th line)

and then compare the .pdf image of the original document:

http://tinyurl.com/3xkv8c (single page; 156 KB in size)

showing the original word is "Guners", with a superscript line over
the "n" indicating the omission of a letter.

John
--


*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis~at~pacbell.net  **   Berkeley,
California, U.S.A.  ***

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list